


Bop to the Top (Ripple Effect Remix)

by SegaBarrett



Category: High School Musical (Movies)
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, F/M, PTSD, Starting Over, allusions to incest, allusions to non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 01:10:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4120831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Try as Ryan might to put Sharpay behind him, she's with him everywhere he goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bop to the Top (Ripple Effect Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Bop to the Top](https://archiveofourown.org/works/107037) by [Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/pseuds/Aris%20Merquoni). 



> Disclaimer: I don't own High School Musical, and I make no money from this. 
> 
> A/N: This fic... stood out to me :) I hope my interpretation isn't too dark.

Ryan tends to look over his shoulder whenever he’s walking alone. He sees shadows hovering behind him, and will whirl around and check them. He feels silly about the whole damn thing, but he reminds himself that it’s not really his fault.

Even though it feels like the whole thing is.

Ten years since high school ended, and ten years since he moved out and swore, aloud, that he’d never talk to Sharpay again. The whole thing had been messed up, screwed up, and he’d known it from the start but went along with it anyway.

That had been his mistake.

It’s hard, living a life without family around. His parents hadn’t understood, and it’s not as if he could have told them. They all saw Sharpay as the perfect child, one who could do no wrong, and in a way that continues to be true.

But whatever she’s doing, he has to keep telling himself that it’s better for everyone if she does it far away from him.

That’s why he’s here in this small town a stone’s throw from Chicago – last he heard, Sharpay was making the rounds in New York. She’s going to be a star.

He takes classes at night and works in a Save-a-Lot during the day. Boring work, bagging people’s things, putting them all together, all the cans together and all the frozen foods together, everything grouped together the way that it all ought to be.

If only he could take his mind and do that; put everything he doesn’t want to deal with off to the side.

But that’s not the way life works, and he knows it. Life isn’t one of he and Sharpay’s production numbers – and there she is again, in his head, smiling at him and telling him that it’s okay. That it doesn’t count. But in the same breath telling him that he better not dare stop. He better listen to her. Follow her lead, dance her dance. She knew the way and if he knew what was best for him, he would follow, even as his mind kept calling out “no, no, no” in little taps like rain drops falling against the windows of his soul.

Even far away from her, he could still hear her voice. Sometimes he did things because he heard a tiny Sharpay-pitched voice in his head telling him to do them. He can hear her voice passing judgment on the people that he meets, the words he says. Like she could go tap-dancing down the halls any second, wow anyone, make the entire world her oyster.

“Oysters are an aphrodisiac,” she told him once, “At least that’s what they say.”

It makes sense, though – the whole world is one whiff of something that you aren’t supposed to have. 

Not unless you’re an Evans twin. Sharpay used to tell him that they deserved the finest things in life. 

He can still remember the night Gabriella Montes won the lead in the musical, the way she’d smiled to the girl’s face but raged about it later.

She’d punched walls, ripped curtains.

Sharpay could be a force of nature when she wanted to be. And Ryan knew that she always wanted to be.

***

He lets himself into his apartment, lets the door click behind him. He’s safe in here, in the place he’s created for himself. In this world he’s created for himself where no one knows.

He’s tossed around the idea of therapy once or twice, but what would be the point? It’s not like he could get up the nerve to actually go, to create words for these things. He’s come to the conclusion that any therapist worth their salt would probably just tell him he was overreacting.

He is just reacting.

Ryan crouches on the mattress on the floor, pulls the blanket over himself, snuggles up to the pillow and closes his eyes. He thinks, again, about getting a cat or a dog so he’s not so lonely, but he’s not sure how he would react to the footsteps in the night, the eyes in the darkness creeping up on him. He always starts at the creaks in the apartment next door, the birds rapping at the window.

But he sleeps.

***

The alarm goes off, and Ryan falls off the mattress and on to the floor. Another day at work, another day bagging and smiling and acting like everything is all right. It’s another form of acting, another form of being on the stage. The uniform is another costume he wears that declares he is the best – the best at pretending.

“Not everyone is as good as us,” Sharpay told him once.

“At what?” He’d asked her.

“At fooling the world into thinking we’re something that we’re not.”

“What’s that something?”

“Perfect,” she’d said. “The most perfect people are the ones who are most shattered underneath. And you and me, we’re the same. That’s why we need each other. Why we always will.”

She’d made it sound like he was some kind of vital organ, that if he cut off contact she would wither and die.

Well, she hasn’t. 

But he has.

He pulls on his shirt and fiddles with his nametag. “Ryan” it declares it big, blue letters. It’s like it’s screaming.

***

“Ryan Evans, please report to the office.” He’s in the middle of triple-bagging some guy’s milk when the announcement comes over the loudspeaker. He flinches and the guy glares at him. It’s never a good idea to let people see the cracks in the windowpane. They don’t like it much.

He figures he’s done something wrong and they’re gearing up to fire him. He’ll have to find a way to make it through – it’s not like he hasn’t reinvented himself before. He’s decided that he won’t ever break down and write to his parents for money, though.

Then he’d have to explain. And that’s something he won’t ever do. 

They make him wait in the office for a few minutes, and then his manager, who has huge sideburns that Ryan finds incredibly distracting, tells him someone’s on the phone for him and that he needs to not get personal calls at work. He apologizes and wonders who could be calling him here.

No one knows him here. Not in this city.

He takes the phone and holds it to his ear.

“Hello. This is Ryan Evans.”

“Hello, Mr. Evans. I’m calling from Fairvale Hospital. You were listed as your sister Sharpay’s emergency contact?”

“I, uh…”

“Well, she’s in the hospital and she’s going to need surgery…”

Ryan tunes out the rest.

He holds the phone away from his ear.

“I’ll drive in,” he says when he puts it back to his ear. “I’ll be right there, by tomorrow.”

Down the rabbit hole again, he thinks. They always did need each other.


End file.
